The most recommended books about the senses

Up-and-coming science writer Ed Yong explains how animals sense the world. We all know about the five senses (seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and touching). An Immense World examines these plus other fascinating examples, such as sensing electric and magnetic fields.

I love how Yong considers all sorts of quirky, oddball animals. Evolution creates so much diversity, and Yong seems to know how to find just the right organism to illustrate his point.

Whether interested in animals that can hear ultrasonic frequencies or see ultraviolet light, this is the book for you. It is wonderfully written, accessible to all, and a delight to read. I hope Ed Yong is busy on his next one. I can’t wait.

Pat the Bunny is designed for the youngest children learning to read, yet I remember this book on our shelf throughout my whole childhood.

Each page is interactive as children are invited to pat the soft bunny, smell the flowers, touch Dad’s scratchy face, and more. Besides learning to read, children learn to notice sensory details in the world around them.

In Neurogastronomy, Gordon Shepherd likens smells to human faces, writing that they are easy to recognize but hard to describe. In Flavor, Bob Holmes introduces readers to a small tribe of nomadic hunter-gatherers in Malaysia, the Jahai, who have more than a dozen words to describe smells, none of which relate to the smell of any particular object. Vocabulary, he writes, is something we can learn with little effort. His experiences with chefs, gastronomy experts, and food scientists may inspire readers to find personal vocabularies. In the end, he writes, “What’s important is that coming up with a description forces me to pay attention and paying attention enriches my flavor experience.”

Are philosophers like detectives, in that they chase their culprit over any terrain, and follow any clue? What can count as a clue?

Given the right context, pretty much anything, a pencil placed here rather than there, a picture of a car, something someone said, a fingerprint. Or are we more like technicians, like the fingerprint expert who only lifts and analyzes prints? The problem with being the fingerprint expert is that it can completely remove philosophers from their originating problems and turn them into mere technicians.

Ned Block is a detective, who has followed clues about the nature of consciousness deep into psychology and neuroscience. Here Block argues that there is a genuine distinction between seeing and thinking, and draws out the consequences of that for our theories of consciousness.

A Natural History of the Senses is gorgeously written and poetic while simultaneously presenting accurate basic science about our five senses. Diane Ackerman stunningly shows how a gifted writer can decipher a field, captivate the general public, and elicit the fascination and wonder that a topic deserves. I am also ever delighted by the fact that the book starts with the sense of smell, rather than relegating it to the least and last section as most books on our senses do. A Natural History of the Senses is a beautiful compendium of biology and a tour of human perception.

We have more than five senses. The sixth, seventh and eighth are the vestibular sense, the proprioceptive sense, and the interoceptive sense. Interoception allows us to sense our internal organs and experience "gut" feelings including hunger, satiety, thirst, itch, pain, temperature, nausea, the need to urinate and defecate, and sexual arousal. This book provides practical solutions for improving self-regulation, self-awareness and social understanding.

Historian Mark Smith has written widely on the topic of understanding sensory experiences of the past.

At just over 100 pages long, his most recent book is an excellent insight into the field for both those new to it, and those who are already familiar with writing history of the senses.

Starting with an overview of the origins of sensory history and moving through to consider both the strengths and challenges of current research in this area, Smith concludes this book with a clear, accessible, and persuasive argument for future directions of work in the field.

I cannot recommend this book highly enough for anyone interested in exploring sensory history!

While not a book explicitly about creativity, it opened my eyes to how our brains work, how we can make them work better, and what we’re just going to have to live with. For instance, “multi-tasking” is really a myth—some brains just switch from one task to another faster and women are better at that than men, something rooted in our evolutionary development. And our brains are hardwired for movement, particularly walking. Developmental neurobiologist Medina offers plenty of food for creative brains.

Perceptual psychologist Lawrence Rosenblum’s book changed the way I thought about my brain on blindness and gave me hope about its ability to adapt. I was astonished by blind painters and mountain bikers, but more importantly, I learned that what often strike us as superpowers, are actually the result of practice and the cross-modal plasticity of the brain. The sighted brains that change after only five days of blindfold and intensive braille training, the experiments that demonstrate how humans can follow a scent trail, and the ways blind people (and sighted people) use echolocation to learn about their micro and macro environments (even if they are not always conscious of it), are just some of Rosenblum’s many examples that are as fun as they are fascinating.

When I was writing my own kid book dealing with monsters, I picked this one up on a whim just to see how kid book authors handle monsters.

I was pleasantly surprised to find it dealt with everything I love: small towns, a gang of kids, and other worldly creatures—in this case vampire-werewolf hybrids. Think Mystic Pizza + Attack the Block. It’s exciting, monster-hunting fun.